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Improving the Usability of Collaboration Methods andTechnologies in Engineering

Lars Wolter, Haygazun Hayka, Rainer Stark

To cite this version:Lars Wolter, Haygazun Hayka, Rainer Stark. Improving the Usability of Collaboration Methods andTechnologies in Engineering. 6th Programming Languages for Manufacturing (PROLAMAT), Oct2013, Dresden, Germany. pp.73-84, �10.1007/978-3-642-41329-2_9�. �hal-01485842�

adfa, p. 1, 2011.

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Improving the Usability of Collaboration Methods and

Technologies in Engineering

Wolter, Lars1, Hayka, Haygazun

2, Stark Rainer

2

1 Chair of Industrial Information Technology (IIT)

Department of Machine Tools and Factory Management, Technische Universität Berlin.

lars.wolter@tu-berlin.de 2 Division Virtual Product Creation

Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK)

rainer.stark@ipk.fraunhofer.de

Abstract. This paper illuminates certain needs and solutions in collaborative

engineering like the ability to initiate collaboration sessions without preparation

steps, the acceptance of collaboration solutions due to heterogeneous IT land-

scapes and the protection of intellectual property rights. These problems are ob-

served together with current solutions in commercial products and research pro-

jects. An overview of those solutions is presented, including their workings,

problems and current state of development adding some in depth information

about current research work conducted by the authors to address these prob-

lems.

Keywords: Collaboration, collaborative engineering, PLM, heterogeneous IT

landscape, intellectual property rights

1 INTRODUCTION

The industry sets new requirements for collaborative engineering due to technological

improvements on products and product development methods, increasing complexity

of supply chains and the trend to establish virtual teams. The paper discusses these

requirements and the resulting fields in need of action. Each field shows different

opportunities for the industry. Technology can give better integration and usability,

the processes can be more transparent and standardized and the human factors can

receive more attention to increase the stimulation of the stakeholders. To utilize all

the opportunities in these fields, the collaborative engineering processes, methods and

tools can not only focus on the technical goals and how to achieve them, they must

also consider the human factor, containing the other stakeholders and there reasons.

Only then the task work can be united with teamwork for successful collaboration.

1.1 The need for Collaborative Engineering

The increasing complexity of consumer products and industrial goods also increases

the complexity of their development. This is given by a raising number of parts in

each individual product and especially the combination of multiple engineering do-

mains into a single product. Additional complexity in today’s product development

originates from release cycles that need to get shorter to stay competitive. To address

the complexity a company needs to involve more people in the development process,

each being an expert in his domain. This also includes the engineers which are experts

for specific domains, parts, functionalities or steps in the development and manufac-

turing process.

As with common meetings collaboration is a task that does not produce anything

but needs to be done to be successful. Therefor the collaboration needs to be efficient

and natural for all participants. The collaboration in product development is happen-

ing on many different levels starting from asynchronous groupware systems, teleco-

operation solutions, viewing collaboration and full featured interactive collaboration.

Additionally the collaboration can be done locally or across long distances, it can be

with or without the use of digital tools. Then there is also the difference of collabora-

tion inside companies which happens intensively and the collaboration with partners

and suppliers which is performed less intensively [1] and is also shown in figure 1.

This increases the complexity of collaboration management which only needed to

supply meeting rooms and a telephone number to allow collaboration. To manage all

the collaboration scenarios in companies today, additional people need to be involved

being experts in the area of collaboration.

The focus during this paper lies in engineering scenarios during virtual engineer-

ing. It does not address collaboration during concept development, production or sell-

ing.

Fig. 1. - Distribution of Engineering Working Time [1]. Communication, coordination and

negotiation happen intensively in the industry.

1.2 Problems of Collaborative Engineering

In collaboration there is a large field of problems that can be analyzed and addressed.

This article focuses on collaboration supported by digital tools that an engineer uses

during his product development tasks. For an engineer the types of tasks have

changed over time. There is much more information needed to fulfill his day-to-day

tasks forcing him to spend a lot of his time to search and acquire this information, not

only from IT-Systems but also from other colleagues or partners. This also means he

has to supply information he generates during his work either by storing them in an

IT-System or by directly communicating them to other people. This additional over-

head is already part of the collaboration happening in a company. Looking at basic

collaboration tasks without the use of digital tools already introduces a lot of prob-

lems. If you leave someone a message on a post-it it can get lost during cleaning, your

block of post-its could be empty or you try to find someone for a talk but don’t know

the room where that person currently is. Those problems can be directly translated to

collaboration using digital tools. For example the email getting lost in the spam-

folder, no free space on the network drives or the Web-Ex session that cannot initiate

because of a too restrictive firewall. These kinds of problems can be addressed very

effectively by rules and a good organization, which are necessary to achieve robust-

ness in using digital engineering technology [2]. But digital tools for collaboration

introduce new kind of problems that need to be addressed separately.

1.2.1 Heterogeneity.

Due to the increasing fragmentation of companies, either through outsourcing or by

integrating other companies leads to the use of multiple IT-Systems dedicated to the

same kind of task. This is also true for the collaboration tools, either stand-alone or

integrated, because most of them can only be connected to tools of the same ven-

dor. This is not a problem with the telephone for example; it can be used with every

other telephone from different vendors.

1.2.2 Tool Acceptance.

An engineer today has to use multiple digital tools to solve his engineering tasks,

this includes CAx, PDM, ERP, MES, Excel, Outlook and various other tools. The

number of tools increases in a collaboration situation because an extra collaboration

tool needs to be used. Same goes for engineering tools, which normally only the col-

laboration partner uses. This is a frustrating situation for the engineer because it may-

be a tool he only uses irregular when contacting a supplier for example and some-

times differs from his regular tools in usage and even methodic concepts. The engi-

neer is naturally blocking to use this extra tool for collaboration resulting in re-

duced efficiency or lesser collaboration.

This also happens for local collaboration scenarios, where multiple people discuss

a situation with a specific tool. This happens in design reviews for example, where a

dedicated operator is necessary to operate the tool introducing an extra layer into the

interaction.

1.2.3 Protection of intellectual property.

The ideas of now products as well as the methods and processes to produce them

are a constant interest for all competitors in the market. Therefor this knowledge

needs to be kept secret. Collaboration using digital tools is normally associated with

sharing your own digital data. This results in trust problems with any kind of new or

specialized tool which connects multiple stakeholders for collaborative purposes.

Opposite to that generally used tools like emails have a very high trust even if they

are used insecurely. The problem is to make any kind of collaboration tool used be

trusted to protect the intellectual property; otherwise it cannot be effectively used.

1.3 How are these problems currently addressed

The market has a multitude of solutions to achieve collaboration in engineering. The

system vendors of larger software products started to integrate collaboration features

in their products. This includes features common to current social media products like

text, audio and video chat combined with the sharing of product data. One example of

those solutions is 3D-Live in Catia v6 from Dassault-Systemes. Such a system works

very well in a homogenous environment, in which all participants use the same CAD

program which tightly integrates into the PDM of the same vendor to make the prod-

uct data sharing available for collaborative engineering. Using a different CAD sys-

tem breaks all the collaboration features.

This problem can be solved by deploying all applications to every user, forcing the

engineer to use multiple IT-Systems in collaborative scenarios. Another way to ad-

dress the heterogeneity problem is to use stand-alone collaboration solutions. Stand-

alone solutions are a less complex extra piece of software, but also need a context

switch and the conversion of the data from the engineering tool. Multiple vendors

developed standalone tools to allow collaboration without the need of supplying the

whole authoring tool set to all users.

There are two kinds of stand-alone solutions for collaboration. Screensharing solu-

tions are the easiest to use in this category and don't need any data conversion. They

work by capturing the contents of the screen or a specific application window and

transmit that as a video stream to the other participants. These solutions are well

known in web conferencing and are widely used because of their ease of usability.

The user just starts the screensharing solution and decides which screen to share. Af-

ter the setup, he only operates his preferred tool. Products in this category are WebEx

from Cisco or WebConf from Adobe. But the concept of screensharing lacks the

possibility of an equal participation in the collaboration scenario, because only one

participant can present his screen to all others. Even when using multiple monitors, a

monitor for each participant would be needed to present all the different views.

The second type of solution is applications that use their own visualization engine

to display geometric models. Most of those solutions import data from the engineer-

ing tool and share them across multiple participants. Because these tools are separate

from the authoring tools, they normally only import common exchange formats. This

means the collaborating engineer needs to export the product data from his applica-

tion in a suitable format for the collaboration tool and all the data need to be transmit-

ted to all participants. This conversion and transfer of product data induces long setup

times. This kind of tools can have a lot of functionality to alter the viewing, leaving

annotations and therefor support the collaboration very well, but results in additional

tool-knowledge for the engineer. Changes that can only be done in the authoring sys-

tem would need an export of the changed product data and redistribution of those

changes to all participants. Examples for this kind of tools are.

The most basic way of collaboration thru sharing data is handled asynchronously.

Data management solutions allow locking of complete files by different users but

there is no technique available that can merge two differently changed CAD files like

Microsoft Word is offering for documents. Most PDM and other data storage systems

ease the asynchronous collaboration with large files by duplicating them to different

sites making them rapidly available from different locations. This is still limited in

speed, but is already well established among the industries.

The last kind of well-established collaboration solutions consists of web based

groupware solutions. They are often based around whole communication solutions for

email, task and workflow management. They allow the users, to exchange tasks, doc-

uments and other information using wikis forums or blogs. Newer systems also incor-

porate so called social office functions to allow commenting, rating and sharing of

information across the company intranet. Examples for these kinds of systems are

Microsoft Office with Sharepoint and Outlook or open source groupware solutions

like Liferay, Tiki-Wiki or other portal solutions. These solutions are independent of

product development but can be customized to fit specific products and companies.

The type of collaboration is limited, but due to the inclusion of real time communica-

tion and web based editors for documents these solutions are not only used for coop-

eration but also full collaboration.

1.4 Research to increase the collaboration efficiency

Some research is done to support the engineering collaboration. One approach is to let

different CAD systems communicate with each other, to allow collaborative design

even with heterogeneous CAD systems. One of those approaches in [3] uses a com-

mon set of commands. Every CAD system translates its own authoring commands to

this common set which is distributed to all participants and at each target platform

converted to a command of that specific CAD system. Therefor it does not need to

exchange any product data beforehand. This approach allows concurrent design from

the beginning; it does not allow modification of existing product data.

Other Research is done to allow better network communication even in firewalled

scenarios across companies for communication applications [4]. This is a very fun-

damental type of research affecting nearly all collaboration attempts which communi-

cate thru the internet. Also very fundamental is research to resolve conflicts in collab-

oratively authored CAD. This is addressed for example by research activities to inte-

grate Boolean operations in CAD systems [5].

There is also research activity to enhance distributed design reviews. There are so-

lutions that adapt to different kind of devices allowing the use of large VR-Cave-

Systems together with participants only using desktop computers during the collabo-

ration. One such approach is documented in [6]. The setup they are using uses VRML

models to visualize 3D data but can also show the screens of the participants using

screensharing.

Many research projects focus on the protection of the intellectual property. Every-

thing related to encryption is only protecting the data while it is traveling between the

collaboration participants. If the aim is to not let one of the participants misuse data

from other participants, any encryption is of no use. Therefor some research projects

describe methods and algorithms to watermark geometric models [7]. This way it can

be traced back where copies originated allowing the owner to sue them. Other meth-

ods reduce the details in certain areas by using multiresolution meshes and specifying

the detail priorities of certain areas [8].

On the other hand there is also research going on for 3D model reconstruction from

image sequences. With flaws this was possible 1996 from camera images [9]. Better

algorithms, the good quality of the rendered images and faster computers allow much

better reconstruction [10]. But for all reconstruction algorithms it is important that

there is at least one image from every feature necessary to reconstruct the original

model. If the backside or inside of an object is never shown, it cannot be reconstruct-

ed.

1.5 Areas in need of Action

1.5.1 Technology.

The Technology for collaboration is in a very good state, but there are technological

problems when different solutions need to be connected.

The rapid increase in information and the expectation of its global availability in-

troduces a new field of information management that does not require a central distri-

bution point but intelligent information containers that can manage the containing

information and is able to route those information to systems and participants in a

collaborative scenario that need them.

Besides the technical areas that are in need of action, the collaboration between en-

gineers needs to address human factors to make the collaboration to something an

engineer wants to do instead of something he needs to do. This can be seen in interac-

tion with tools, where a user is pleased to use a tablet-pc to read its newspaper using

simple gestures. This kind of technology common to consumer products needs to be

adapted to solutions for the industry.

1.5.2 Processes.

The business processes need to address the specialty in collaborative processes. When

working in a collaborative manner, each step has a meaning for the task the group

does together, like the patterns in [11]. This can also lead to additional tasks for col-

laborative processes, because after a collaborative session the gathered information

needs to be converged from multiple participants before it can be evaluated.

1.5.3 Methods.

The different methods of collaboration can be as coarse has to choose from personal

meeting, phone call or use of email to very fine grained methods that define the for-

mat of the emails to send for specific tasks. Having a method for handling specific

collaboration tasks is a must, to ensure correct flow of the information.

2 NEW SOLUTIONS FOR COLLABORATIVE

ENGINEERING

To fill some of the gaps presented above the following solution are described. These

solutions handle different collaboration scenarios like local collaboration on multi-

touch tables as well as remote collaboration over the network.

2.1 Using current Touch Technology for local Cooperation

Fig. 2. - Touch optimized visualization of a product structure

The technology for touch is well established in the consumer area. The technology is

also very mature in its use. To be of a real benefit in the industry not only the technol-

ogy needs to be used, but also the methods must adapt to the scenarios, where multi-

touch environments can be used to raise the efficiency of engineering processes. Dur-

ing the research at the Fraunhofer IPK methods where developed to visualize product

structures on multitouch tables [12]. The requirement is a good usability with touch

devices but also be understandable und usable in a multi-person-scenario where the

participants have different views onto the multitouch device. This resulted in a Voro-

noi [13] based structure as seen in figure 1. This special structure was analyzed to see

if it can fulfill some typical tasks in engineering like search and compare operations

with this structure [14]

Fig. 3. - Multi-User Multitouch environment for design reviews.

In figure 3 this special application can be seen in a multi user environment. It allows

multiple participants in a meeting to either work in their own workplace or to cooper-

ate with some or all of the other participants. This allows part of the cooperating

group to prepare their content while others are discussing a previous item. The exam-

ple is the door of a car. In this example the expert for the door opener can discuss

some details with the chassis expert while the experts for the window-lifter-system

illuminate the use of an extra-ordinary expensive part to the management.

2.2 Technology for secure and instant collaboration

The here presented solution constitutes a combination of screen sharing and the local

visualization at each participant. In contrast to screen sharing not the whole program

window or the whole desktop is being transmitted, but only the 2D image of the ren-

dered 3D model, which is superimposed with the images of all participants. A correct

superposition is necessary so that every participant can correctly perceive the visual

impression of the complete product and properly interpret the correlations and dis-

tances between the components.

This collaboration technique focuses on different scenarios shown in figure 4. All

participants shown in figure 4 see a 3D representation of the object being reviewed, in

this case a truck. The parts in blue are locally existent as 3D-Modells and are locally

rendered on the computer and the rendered image is transferred to all participants.

The gray parts of the model do not exist on the local computer. They are just 2D im-

ages streamed from one of the other participants. All views share the same point of

view and orientation while looking at the truck. This information is also shared

among the users and consists of a simple matrix. The scenario can also incorporate

special participants like the mobile lead engineer which only needs a web browser to

join the session. He is not supplying any 3D model, he just consumes the images. The

opposing case is the PDM System at site B which just renders it locally stored data

and sends it to the others. This participant does not consume any information.

Fig. 4. - The different collaboration scenarios condensed in a single collaboration.

All the other participants, the OEM at site east and the two suppliers deliver their

own data and consume from the others. The OEM holds the 3D models of the chassis,

while supplier A holds the cabin and supplier B the wheels. They only deliver their

own property as images without being afraid that for example supplier B can steal the

3D model data from supplier A.

To achieve the correct superposition a so-called depth image is transmitted addi-

tionally. The depth images can be used, to decide for every pixel from which 2D im-

age the respective pixel should be used figure 5.

To create, transmit or show it on a screen, a 2D image of a 3D model must be ren-

dered. This process is called image synthesis, where for each pixel on the screen must

be determined, which part of the 3D model it represents. The color of that point is

being shown at this pixel (figure 5, bottom left). The depth image is constructed on

the same principle. This is achieved by storing a distance value instead of a color

value. If you interpret this distance value as a color, so is the value that represents the

pixel brighter for larger distances and darker for shorter distances.

At multiple participants a color- and depth rendering is created that are all collect-

ed. These can now be used to construct a joint image. Condition is that all participants

have the same point of view. This joint point of view acts as a zero point of the

viewed scene and is reached by using the aforementioned matrix that is shared among

the participants. This aspect corresponds to the technique of local visualization where

likewise just the view matrix needs to be exchanged.

Assuming there are three participants with color renderings C1-C3 and depth ren-

derings D1-D3. Then for each pixel it is analyzed which of the three Dx is the darkest.

If it is D3 then the color value of C3 is being used. That way a new image is assem-

bled where all models of all three participants are integrated. An interpolation allows

combining images with different resolutions as long as the aspect ratio is maintained.

This is of advantage when generating images on hardware with different performanc-

es. The images from different sources can still be combined. The realization of this

technology was executed in a prototypic collaboration tool.

2.3 Increased acceptance through collab-oration using CAD systems

To approach the problem of acceptance, methods were evaluated to include collabora-

tion functionality in existing CAD systems. Through the strong link with the render-

ing an easy connection via a plugin is difficult. In the course of work the CAD sys-

tems Spaceclaim and NX were extended via plugins in a way that they communicate

their viewing location with other participants and could react to commands. Doing

that the CAD systems showed limitations of different magnitude. The realization of

the plugin proved more difficult for NX than for Spaceclaim. An automatic reacting

e.g. to the network commands could not be realized with the NX API until the end of

the project. Nonetheless the realization of the plugins proved that a collaborative cou-

pling of two very diverse CAD systems is possible and a consequent commitment

across manufacturers towards an open adaption of the API according to the CPO

could create new possibilities.

Similar as in [3] it was also tested to fulfill some modeling tasks using heterogene-

ous CAD systems. But the target was different as in the paper because the focus is

still located in the design review scenario where existing CAD Models need to be

examined and possibly changed. Therefor the problem of identifying the same parts in

the different systems needs to be managed. The research in this area is still ongoing,

to deliver a solid solution.

Fig. 5. - Description of the image merging algorithm that merges two rendered images dis-

played at the top into a single image in the bottom middle. Therefor it uses a depth image ex-

plained on bottom left. Bottom right describes the basic principle of rendering a 3D scene into a

2D image in conjunction to the rendering of a depth image.

3 CONCLUSIONS

The increasing need for effective collaboration solutions is a challenge for today’s

companies. But system vendors and research facilities are continuing to generate bet-

ter solutions. Useful cross vendor programs like the codex of PLM openness can en-

sure that future collaboration solutions will not suffer because of heterogeneous IT

landscapes. The continuous evolvement of user interaction technologies from the

consumer market into the industry gives the opportunities for user friendly and easy to

use solutions. The presented solutions and ongoing research work introduce new ac-

cents for collaboration. These accents can be used by the industry to bring new con-

cepts of collaboration into the companies to increase their collaboration abilities.

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